Business Secretary Vince Cable has been forced to apologise after a tabloid newspaper discovered that he had left bags full of confidential Liberal Democrat principles in bins outside his constituency office.

The principles were retrieved by a journalist who said they were completely shredded and unrecognisable. ‘They were filthy, covered in a sort of overpowering blue goo and totally unusable’.

Mr Cable’s office insisted that none of the principles were in any way sensitive or important and that nobody had been put at risk by their complete abandonment. ‘To be honest we’re not sure what the point of them was in the first place,’ said a spokesman. ‘But we hadn’t intended to leave them where people would find them – we’d asked Oliver Letwin to get rid of them for us.’